Contributed by jose on from the spyware dept.
" symon is an active minimalistic system monitor that can report cpu, memory, interface, disk and pf statistics to a gatherer somewhere on the network every 5 seconds. It can do all this without noticable impact on system performance -- I use it to measure my soekris, for example.This looks like a pretty neat way to keep a quick eye on several hosts easily, ie a server farm or a headless server. A test port is also on the site. Glad to see it's getting active development and feedback.The package comes with a monitor (symon), a gatherer (symux) that can handle arbitrary numbers of symons and a web frontend (symon2web).
Although symon is ideal for profiling jobs, it might also fill some people's daily administration needs.
Source, manuals, port Makefile and pretty pictures on: http://www.xs4all.nl/~wpd/symon
(It was announced on tech@ in http://www.sigmasoft.com/~openbsd/archive/openbsd-tech/200209/msg00074.html) "
(Comments are closed)
By Theodore () on
By Matt Burke () matt@botchitt.com on mailto:matt@botchitt.com
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By Matt Burke () matt@botchitt.com on mailto:matt@botchitt.com
By -- () -- on --
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By Willem Dijkstra () wpd@xs4all.nl on http://www.xs4all.nl/~wpd/symon
One of the design decisions, however, was that the action of monitoring should lead to no (and failing that, little) impact on the monitored system.
This means that the probes are configured a priori and that symon will not act on incoming network traffic (it only spews data).
rmon is for interchange of primarily network related data. symon has this data, but also data with slightly different semantics. (host data like memory usage)
The difference between symon and snmp is far and wide. snmp means polling for information periodically, where the period is normally between one and 5 minutes. symon is about actively forwarding monitored information every 5 seconds. With snmp, you need to traverse the MIB to get particular information, with symon you get what you specified in the configuration file. symon was specifically built to not take actions on any incoming traffic. (I use OpenBSD because I'm a paranoid freak - this stance is reflected in the way that the program was built)
To me, it is clear that symon will not scale to hundreds of hosts. (Who would need 5 second statistics for hundreds of hosts anyway?) snmp will scale, because you're not asking every host and router to report their stuff every 5 seconds.
symon is intended for near real-time monitoring purposes. It was built for profiling jobs and/or keeping a close eye on your true network assets. (main firewall, main webservers)
By Gimlet () tkyle.@.umsl..edu on mailto:tkyle.@.umsl..edu
Now I'm trying to get symon2web to generate me some graphs! I've got my .rrd files in /usr/local/share/symon (the default). I have the web files in /var/www/htdocs/symon, with datasources.inc including the following:
$symon2web["tree"]='/usr/local/symon';
In /usr/local/symon I have a symlink 'hostname' to /usr/local/share/symon. I get broken graphs. Am I just being impatient in waiting for data, or have I made a fundamental mistake?
Anyone?
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By Gimlet () on
My face is slightly less red since it doesn't mention it in the install docs. ;^)
By Tom Buskey () spamme@punkass.com on mailto:spamme@punkass.com
I used to use mrtg to monitor every port on my network: switches, routers, etc. Then I could point to individual bandwith users if there was a problem. I could also show everyone in the company that 'the internet is slow' was not our link.
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By Willem Dijkstra () wpd@xs4all.nl on http://www.xs4all.nl/~wpd/symon
The rest of the code (symux = gatherer, symon2web) could be made to run on any of the above with very little effort.
By Anonymous Coward () on
bash-2.05# make
Fatal: Need version 1.502 of bsd.port.mk.
*** Error code 1
Stop.
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By Willem Dijkstra () wpd@xs4all.nl on http://www.xs4all.nl/~wpd/symon
1) Look at the port Makefile and remove the NEED_VERSION.
(The porting documentation states that the developer of the port should put this in. It is to make sure that when you use bsd.port.mk functionality, you are sure that the current version supports that.
I'm not doing very weird stuff, so it should run without the NEED_VERSION.)
2) Get a more current ports.tar.gz. This should not break anything. (Famous last words)
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By sam () on
Might be a better idea than hacking stuff and causing more problems in the future.
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By Anonymous Coward () on
I am having these problems on 3.0, Even after the makefile is edited, it will not compile. I think he should change his website.
By Anonymous Coward () on